As is well known to those skilled in the culinary profession, pizza pies are customarily cooked in commercial ovens specifically designed to bake this type of pie. Basically, there are two types of ovens that are specifically designed to bake pizza pies, one is a conventional metal oven and two is the stone or brick oven both of which may be fired either by electric, wood, coal, gas or the combination thereof. To certain consumers and the gourmet connoisseur diners, the brick oven is the preferred and perhaps, the only way in which a satisfactorily pizza pie, strombolli, calzone, etc. can be baked. This is not to say that the ordinary oven or oven-toaster cannot be utilized to bake a pizza pie or make the bake other baked goods. To this end, this invention is only concerned with the brick or stone type of oven and particularly, to an oven that is portable in the same sense that an outdoor or barbeque grill is portable. Of course, one would understand that even though the oven is of the outdoor grill type, this does not preclude the use of such an oven as a vendor type of oven where the owner would be in the business of selling pizza or providing pizza at a party or the like. It is believed that currently there are no portable brick ovens that are specifically designed to bake pizza pies, although there are no limitations as to what can be baked therein. One of the problems that is universal in brick types of ovens is that in order to obtain a satisfactory product, it is necessary to provide a constant heat to the oven otherwise the texture, taste and aesthetics of the product is adversely affected. To overcome this problem some of the ovens are designed to include a second source of heat or the shape of the oven is optimized to avoid loss of heat that would occur by air currents impacting the area being heated when the oven door is opened. Another important consideration in the oven is the time required to bake the product. As is known to those skilled in this technology, it requires a considerable amount of time, reasonably speaking, to bake a pizza and typically twenty minutes for the standard size pizza is considered the norm. While this invention is unique in that it is a portable brick oven, it also obviates the problems noted in the immediately above paragraphs.
Examples of brick ovens are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,413,033 entitled "Oven With A Stone Covered Bottom" granted on May 9, 1995 to Riccio and U.S. Pat. No. 5,605,092 entitled "Oven With Stone Covered Bottom And Supplemental Heater" granted on Feb. 25, 1997 to Ricco. The ovens disclosed in these two patents are commercial and are concerned with increasing productivity of the oven by providing more than one access into the oven and the problem of cooling the stones when air passes thereover when the access doors to the oven are opened. U.S. Pat. No. 5,031,602 entitled "Convertible Portable Cooking Apparatus" granted to Vick on Jul. 16, 1991 exemplifies a portable type grill that is convertible to an oven but is not of the brick type that is contemplated by this invention.
This invention contemplates a portable oven that is made from bricks and is adapted to be fired by a typical 20 pound propane tank of the type that is generally used in residential outdoor grills. The bricks are judicially arranged so that the oven will provide convection, radiation and conduction modes of heating and unlike the commercial ovens that typically require twenty minutes or more to bake an ordinary sized pizza, the oven of this invention reduces the baking time considerably.